The Pirate Bay files charges against media companies

In an interesting twist of events in the MediaDefender story, The Pirate Bay has filed a criminal complaint against 10 major music and movie firms over alleged attacks against the controversial file sharing tracker site.

The case is built on information from Media Defender’s leaked emails, which allegedly contain evidence that the content industry have been paying them to hack the popular Torrent tracking site. Since MediaDefender has no Swedish company structure, The Pirate Bay is instead filing its complaint against the media companies’ Swedish subsidiaries, with infrastructural sabotage, denial of service attacks and other hacking and spamming offenses. Some of the big names include Twentieth Century Fox, Universal, Sony and Paramount.

Despite complaints from media and content companies that many of the torrents that The Pirate Bay tracks are illegal to download, the site has continued to operate in Sweden – where laws fail to see the hosting of BitTorrent links as piracy. It's unclear whether the leaked emails are admissible as evidence under Swedish law, however. The courts are expected to decide the validity of the case later this week.